A Surprise Christmas Proposal

‘I usually see Peter,’ I said, offering her a way out. ‘If he’s in? He understands what I can do.’

The look I got suggested that she understood, too. Only too well. ‘Peter is on holiday. If you want to see him you’ll have to come back next month. But I doubt if even he would be able to help you. Companies are looking for function rather than adornment in their staff these days.’ The woman indicated the file in front of her. ‘You’ve had a lot of jobs, Miss Harrington, but you don’t appear to be actually qualified for anything. Do you…did you ever…have a career plan?’

‘A career plan?’

For heaven’s sake, did this woman think I was a total fool? Of course I’d had a career plan. It had involved an excessive quantity of white lace, two rings and a large marquee in the garden of my parents’ home. I’d started working on it from the moment I first set eyes on Perry Fotheringay in a pair of skin-tight jodhpurs at some horsey charity do my mother had organised.

I was going to get engaged on my nineteenth birthday, married on my twentieth. I was going to have four children—with a Norland nanny to do all the yucky stuff—breed prize-winning Irish setters and live happily ever after in a small Elizabethan manor house in Berkshire.

Perfect.

Unfortunately Peregrine Charles Fotheringay, a man of smouldering good looks and heir to the manor house in question, had had a career plan of his own. One that did not include me. At least, not in connection with the white lace, rings and marquee.

And when that plan fell apart I just hadn’t had the heart to start again from scratch.

Probably because I didn’t have a heart. I’d given it away. It was gathering dust somewhere, along with my career plan, in PCF’s trophy cabinet.

My big mistake had been to believe, when he’d said he loved me, that marriage would follow. An even bigger mistake had been to fall totally, helplessly, hopelessly in love with him. I had discovered, too late, that men like him didn’t marry for love, but for advantage. And, having taken full and frequent advantage of my stupidity—admittedly with my whole-hearted co-operation—he’d married the heiress to a fortune large enough to fund the expensive upkeep of the said Elizabethan manor and keep him in the kind of luxury to which he felt entitled. As his father had done before him, apparently.

As Perry had explained when I confronted him with a copy of The Times in which his name was linked with the said heiress under the heading ‘Forthcoming Weddings’, it was in the nature of a family business: Fotheringay men didn’t work for their money; they married it.

The heiress was short-changed. For that kind of money she really should have got a title as well.

Anyway.

Here I was, spending my twenty-fifth birthday at an employment agency when I should have been organising a spur-of-the-moment frivolous celebratory bash for my friends. The kind that takes weeks to plan. I just hadn’t got the heart. What was there to celebrate? I was twenty-five, for heaven’s sake—that was a quarter of a century—and to make things worse my father had persuaded the trustees of my grandmother’s trust fund to put a stop on my monthly allowance so that I would have to get a serious job and stand on my own two feet.

That would teach me to tell little white lies.

Three months ago, in a spectacularly successful attempt to toss my shy best friend into the path of a billionaire playboy, I’d made up a story about having to hang onto my job because my father was threatening to stop my allowance. Something he did on a fairly regular basis, but which we both knew was nothing but bluff and bluster.

But now he’d actually done it.

It was for my own good, he had assured me.

Oh, sure.

I might not be clever, like my sister Kate, but I wasn’t stupid. I could see the way his mind was working. He thought that if I was short of money I’d have no choice but to return to the family nest and play housekeeper to him: a singularly unattractive prospect that offered all the undesirable aspects of marriage without any of the fun. Which was presumably why my mother had legged it with the first man to pay her a compliment since she’d walked down the aisle as Mrs Harrington.

‘Well?’

Miss Frosty was getting impatient.

‘Not a career plan as such,’ I said. Even I could see that she wasn’t going to be impressed with my romantic notions of connubial bliss. With the twenty-twenty vision of hindsight even I could see that it wasn’t so much a career plan as total fantasy… ‘I was never what you could describe as academic. My strengths are in what my mother described as “home skills”.’

‘Home skills?’ She didn’t actually get as far as smiling, but she did brighten considerably. ‘What kind of home skills?’

‘You know…flower arranging—that sort of stuff. I can do wonders with an armful of Rose Bay Willow Herb and Cow Parsley.’

‘I see.’ There was a significant pause. ‘And do you have a City and Guilds qualification for this?’ she asked finally. ‘Something I can offer an employer as proof of your capabilities?’

I was forced to admit that I hadn’t. ‘But the Ladies’ Home Union were jolly impressed when I stood in for my mother at the church flower festival at such short notice.’ Well, they’d been polite anyway. No one had so much as breathed the word ‘weeds’. Not within my hearing, anyway. Which, considering they’d been expecting the best blooms from my mother’s garden, had been generous of them.

Unfortunately, when she’d decided she’d had enough of tweeds and dogs and jumble sales and departed for South Africa with the muscular professional from the golf club, my father had driven a tractor through her prize-winning roses. Then, when there was nothing left to flatten, he’d repeated this pointless act of vandalism by doing the same thing to her immaculate herbaceous borders.

Now, that was stupid. She wasn’t there to have her heart broken over the destruction of all her hard work. She didn’t even know he’d done it, for goodness’ sake. And he was the one who had to live with the mess.

But after that Willow Herb and Cow Parsley had been all that I could lay my hands on in any quantity at such short notice.

‘Anything else?’

‘What? Oh…’ I was beginning to get irritated by this woman. Just because I couldn’t type a squillion words a minute, or do much more than send e-mails on my laptop, it didn’t mean I was worthless.

Did it?

No. Of course not. There were all kinds of things I could do. And with a sudden rush of inspiration I said, ‘I have organisational skills.’

I could organise great parties, for a start. That took skill. One look at Miss Frosty Face, however, warned me that party organising might not actually be considered much of an asset in the job market. Frivolity in the workplace was definitely a thing of the past.

But there were other things.

‘I can organise a fundraiser for the Brownies, or a cricket club tea, or a church whist drive.’ In theory, anyway. I’d never done any of those things single-handedly but, unlike my clever older sister, who had been too busy studying to get involved, I’d enjoyed helping my mother do all those things. It had been a heck of a lot more fun than revising for boring old exams, and it wasn’t as if I’d had any intention of going to university. I’d been going to follow in my mother’s footsteps—marry landed gentry and spend the rest of my life oiling the community wheels of village life.

Of course Kate had never had any trouble getting—or keeping—a job. And now she had a totally gorgeous barrister husband who adored her, too.

Maybe I should have paid more attention at school.

‘I can produce fairy cakes in vast quantities, ditto scones and sandwiches at the drop of a hat.’ I hadn’t done it since I’d left home at eighteen—to avoid running into PCF in the village, driving his new Ferrari, a wedding present from his bride—but it was like riding a bicycle. Probably. ‘And I can speak French, too,’ I said, getting a bit carried away.

‘Well?’

When I hesitated between lying through my teeth and a realistic appraisal of my linguistic skills she reeled off something double-quick in French. Too fast for me to understand, but I could tell it was a question because of the intonation. And I could make a good guess at what she was asking…

Show-off.

‘And play the piano.’ Before she could ask me the difference between a crotchet and a quaver I added, ‘And I know how to address anyone, from a Duke to an Archbishop—’

‘Then you appear to have missed your vocation,’ she said, cutting me off before I made a total idiot of myself. Or maybe not. Her expression suggested that I was way beyond that point. ‘You were clearly destined to marry one of the minor royals.’

I began to laugh. Too late I discovered I was on my own. This was not, apparently, her idea of a little light-hearted banter.

It occurred to me that this woman did not—unlike the much missed Peter—have a sense of humour. And, unlike him, she did not look upon a lack of formal qualifications as a challenge to her ingenuity; she just thought I was a total waste of space, a spoilt ‘princess’ who had some kind of nerve taking up her valuable time and expecting to be taken seriously.

It occurred to me, somewhat belatedly, that she might have a point, and that maybe I should consider a totally serious reappraisal of my entire life. And I would. Just as soon as I was in gainful employment.

‘Look, I don’t need a job that pays a fortune,’ I told her. ‘I just need to be able to pay the bills.’ And treat myself to a new lipstick now and then. Not a fortune, but not exactly peanuts, either. At least I had the luxury of living rent-free, thanks to Aunt Cora, who preferred the guaranteed warmth of her villa in the south of France to the London apartment that had been part of her lucrative divorce settlement. I only hoped my mother had been taking notes… ‘I’ll consider anything. Really.’

‘I see. Well, since your skills appear to be of the domestic variety, Miss Harrington, maybe you could put them to good use. I don’t have much call for free-form flower arrangers just now, but how are you at cleaning?’